Harper Lee, 89, author of 'To Kill a Mockingbird' . NEW YORK - Harper
Lee, whose first novel, "To Kill a Mockingbird," about racial injustice
in a small Alabama town, sold more than 40 million copies and became
one of the most beloved and most taught works of fiction ever written
by an American, died on Friday in Monroeville, Ala., where she lived.
She was 89. Hank Conner, a nephew of Ms. Lee's, said she died in her
sleep at the Meadows, an assisted living facility. The instant success
of "To Kill a Mockingbird," which was published in 1960 and won the
Pulitzer Prize for fiction the next year, turned Ms. Lee into a
literary celebrity, a role she found oppressive and never learned to
accept. "I never expected any sort of success with 'Mockingbird,' " Ms.
Lee told a radio interviewer in 1964. "I was hoping for a quick and
merciful death at the hands of the reviewers, but, at the same time I
sort of hoped someone would like it well enough to give me
encouragement. The enormous success of the film version of the novel,
released in 1962 with Gregory Peck in the starring role of Atticus
Finch, a small-town Southern lawyer who defends a black man falsely
accused of raping a white woman, only added to Ms. Lee's fame and
fanned expectations for her next novel. Statement from HarperCollins
Lee elusive as 'Mockingbird' soared In 'Watchman,' Finch is flawed But
for more than half a century, a second novel failed to turn up, and Ms.
Lee gained a reputation as a literary Garbo, a recluse whose public
appearances to accept an award or an honorary degree counted as
important news simply because of their rarity. On such occasions she
did not speak, other than to say a brief thank you. Then, in February
2015, long after the reading public had given up on seeing anything
more from Ms. Lee, her publisher, Harper, an imprint of HarperCollins,
dropped a bombshell. It announced plans to publish a manuscript - long
thought to be lost and now resurfacing in mysterious circumstances -
that Ms. Lee had submitted to her editors in 1957 under the title "Go
Set a Watchman. Ms. Lee's lawyer, Tonja B. Carter, had chanced upon it,
attached to an original typescript of "To Kill a Mockingbird," while
looking through Ms. Lee's papers, the publishers explained. It told the
story of Atticus and his daughter, Jean Louise Finch, known as Scout,
20 years later, when Scout was a young woman living in New York. It
included several scenes in which Atticus expresses conservative views
on race relations seemingly at odds with his liberal stance in the
earlier novel. The book was published in July with an initial printing
of 2 million and, with enormous advance sales, immediately leapt to the
top of the fiction bestseller lists, despite tepid reviews. "To Kill a
Mockingbird" was really two books in one: a sweet, often humorous
portrait of small-town life in the 1930s, and a sobering tale of race
relations in the Deep South during the Jim Crow era. Looking back on
her childhood as a precocious tomboy, Scout, the narrator, evokes the
sultry summers and simple pleasures of an ordinary small town in
Alabama. At a time when Southern fiction inclined toward the Gothic,
Ms. Lee, with a keen eye and a sharp ear for dialogue, presented "the
more smiling aspects" of Southern life, to borrow a phrase from William
Dean Howells. At the same time, her stark morality tale of a righteous
Southern lawyer who stands firm against racism and mob rule struck a
chord with Americans, many of them becoming aware of the civil rights
movement for the first time. The novel had its critics. "It's
interesting that all the folks that are buying it don't know they're
reading a child's book," Flannery O'Connor wrote in a letter to a
friend shortly after the novel's appearance. Some reviewers complained
that the perceptions attributed to Scout were far too complex for a
girl just starting grade school and dismissed Atticus as a kind of
Southern Judge Hardy, dispensing moral bromides. The book soared miles
above such criticisms. By the late 1970s "To Kill a Mockingbird" had
sold nearly 10 million copies, and in 1988 the National Council of
Teachers of English reported that it was being taught in 74 percent of
the nation's secondary schools. 'I never expected any sort of success
with "Mocking- bird." A decade later, Library Journal declared it the
best novel of the 20th century. Nelle Harper Lee was born in the poky
little town of Monroeville, in southern Alabama, the youngest of four
children. "Nelle" was a backward spelling of her maternal grandmother's
first name, and Ms. Lee dropped it when "To Kill a Mockingbird" was
published, out of fear that readers would pronounce it Nellie, which
she hated. Her father, Asa Coleman Lee, was a prominent lawyer and the
model for Atticus Finch, who shared his stilted diction and lofty sense
of civic duty. Her mother, Frances Finch Lee, also known as Miss Fanny,
was overweight and emotionally fragile. Truman Capote, a friend of Ms.
Lee's from childhood, later said that Nelle's mother had tried to drown
her in the bathtub on two occasions, an assertion that Ms. Lee
indignantly denied. Ms. Lee was a tough little tomboy who enjoyed
beating up the local boys, climbing trees, and rolling in the dirt. "A
dress on the young Nelle would have been as out of place as a silk hat
on a hog," recalled Marie Rudisill, Capote's aunt, in her book "Truman
Capote: The Story of His Bizarre and Exotic Boyhood by an Aunt Who
Helped Raise Him. One boy on the receiving end of Nelle's thrashings
was Truman Persons (later Capote), who spent several summers next door
to Nelle with relatives. The two became fast friends, acting out
adventures from "The Rover Boys" and, after Nelle's father gave the two
children an old Underwood typewriter, making up their own stories to
dictate to each other. Capote later wrote Nelle into his first book,
"Other Voices, Other Rooms," where she appears as the tomboy Idabel
Tompkins. She made a repeat appearance as Ann Finchburg, nicknamed
Jumbo, in his story "The Thanksgiving Visitor. Ms. Lee returned the
favor, casting Capote in the role of the little blond tale-spinner Dill
in "To Kill a Mockingbird. Ms. Lee attended Huntingdon College, a local
Methodist school for women, where she contributed occasional articles
to the campus newspaper and two fictional vignettes to the college's
literary magazine. After a year at Huntingdon, Ms. Lee transferred to
the University of Alabama to study law, primarily to please her father.
Her own interests, and perhaps her disposition, led her elsewhere.
After her senior year, she spent a summer at Oxford University as part
of a student-exchange program. On her return from England, she decided
to go to New York and become a writer. Ms. Lee arrived in Manhattan in
1949 and settled into a cold-water apartment in the East 80s. After
working briefly at a bookstore, she found work as a reservations agent,
first for Eastern Airlines and later for BOAC. At night she wrote on a
desk made from a door. The local colony of displaced Southerners
regarded her askance. "We didn't think she was up to much," recalled
Louise Sims, the wife of the saxophonist Zoot Sims. "She said she was
writing a book, and that was that. Editors at Lippincott told Ms. Lee
that her manuscript read like a string of anecdotes, not a novel, but
encouraged her to revise. Eventually they paid a small advance and
assigned her to work with Tay Hohoff, an experienced editor with whom
she developed a close working and personal relationship. Signs of its
success were visible almost immediately after it was published in July
1960. Both Book-of-the-Month Club and the Literary Guild made the novel
one of their selections, and Reader's Digest selected it for
publication in condensed form. A week after its publication, it jumped
to the top of the bestseller lists; it remained there for 88 weeks.
News of the rediscovery of "Go Set a Watchman" threw the literary world
into turmoil. Many critics, as well as friends of Ms. Lee, found the
timing and the rediscovery story suspicious, and openly questioned
whether Ms. Lee, who was shielded from the press by Carter, was
mentally competent to approve its publication. It remained an open
question, for many critics, whether "Go Set a Watchman" was anything
more than the initial draft of "To Kill a Mockingbird. In a statement,
Ms. Lee, who said that she had assumed the manuscript was lost, wrote,
"After much thought and hesitation, I shared it with a handful of
people I trust and was pleased to hear that they considered it worthy
of publication.
